Information, Education and Communication Campaigns

The paper by the Institute for Social and Economic Change documents the case of Ward No. 39 situated at the outskirts of the Bangalore city to understand the emerging groundwater crisis due to overdraft in urban areas. Bangalore has no perennial river, which resulted in the growth of many lakes, acting as a source of groundwater recharge earlier.

This report published by SANDRP, Urgewald and International Rivers Network (IRN) provides a brief background on India's power and financial sectors and illustrates the issues at stake by giving examples of two important power projects in India, the Dabhol project and the Maheshwar project.

The next part of the report describes the role that the domestic and international financial institutions have played and continue to play and the controversies that have been associated with the functioning of these institutions in the implementation of the hydropower projects in India.

The report emphasises the importance of the role of NGOs and civil society movements in making these institutions accountable to the common people whose lives are affected by the projects/ interventions.

This document by International Rivers Network provides a background for the recent plans initiated by India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bhutan to build several hundred dams on the Himalayan mountains, which store vast amounts of water and with their high slopes and fast moving rivers, present a huge potential for generating hydropower.

India, Nepal, Pakistan and Bhutan have been facing the increasing challenges of meeting their rising elecricity and energy needs and hydropower dams in the Himalayas are being proposed as solutions to meet a considerable part of these requirements.

The document examines the various arguments that have been put forward against the building of the dams as against the proposed advantages that the dams are claimed to have for these four countries, which share common geographical, topographical and eco-climatic features but have starkly different political and economic contexts.

WIO Urges the Government of Orissa to come out with a While Paper on state and availability status of water resources in the state. The demand comes in the wake of the government's consistent claim that the state is water surplus even though water scarcity hits us all every day.

Sambalpur, 5th August 2010 -  As the industrial overdrive of Orissa continues with signing of MoU after MoU with water guzzling industries, there is no clarity on the exact water available in the state.  The government has been propagating that Orissa is a water surplus state. However, statistics used by the various reports of the government are dated to 2001, from when the real industrialization boom has taken off in the state.  It is time that the government comes out with a transparent position paper on the exact water availability in the state or else water conflicts will aggravate.

A Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index (CEPI) is a very useful tool to capture the health dimensions of the environment including air, water and land. The CEPI is intended to act as an early warning tool and can help in categorising the industrial clusters/areas in terms of priority of planning needs for interventions.

This report by the Central Pollution and Control Board (CPCB) presents the results of the application of the CEPI to selected industrial clusters or areas.

The main objective of the study was to identify polluted industrial clusters or areas in order to take concerted action and to centrally monitor them at the national level. This was in order to improve the current status of environmental components such as air and water quality data, ecological damage, and visual environmental conditions.

The study by Carewater INREM Foundation explores the rise of Reverse Osmosis (RO) plants since 1970s as a cottage industry for providing fluoride free water supply in North Gujarat.

This book is essential reading for economists, power sector officials, power generation companies and environmentalists alike.

Dr.Bharat Jhunjhumwala holds a BSc degree in physics, chemistry and mathematics. He earned his PhD in food and Resource Economics from University of Florida at a tender age of 23 years. He joined Indian institute of management, Bangalore as Assistant professor immediately thereafter. He lived in a slum for two years to understand poverty and organized the Trade Union at IIM during the Emergency. He resigned from the IIM and became a consultant to donor agencies like Swiss Development Cooperation, Oxfam, Care, Overseas Development Institute and others mainly on rural development and watershed issues. He writes a column on economic issues for about 50 newspapers in india. He lives on the banks of River Alaknanda in uttarakhand on the feet of Lord Badri Vishal.

Floods: lessons to be learnt from the massive flooding in Surat city

A report by IIM criticises the way in which dams are managed in the country and calls for the need to apply Management Science / Operations Research techniques and information technology to improve dam management and prevention of floods

Flood fury: are we ready to face such an event?

This link on the Central Public Health and Environmental Engineering Organisation (CPHEEO) website, presents data related to the status of the urban water, sanitation and solid waste management in India. The data includes information on:

• Status of water supply (physical)
• Status of urban water supply (financial)
• Status of urban sewerage/sanitation system
• Status of low cost sanitation
• Status of solid waste management

Data is included from different states in India namely Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Pondicherry, Sikkim and Tamilnadu respectively.

The field research study conducted by Carewater INREM Foundation attempts to establish the impacts of groundwater contamination with fluoride and arsenic in India. It maps the affliction severity, the medical cost and wage loss through a multi-location study in some villages in the States of Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and West Bengal.